


The Bridge

by beanarie



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Reichenswap, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 18:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1698254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock stands on the bridge, looking out, seeing nothing. He goes there often without even thinking about it, telling himself or others he'll go home to rest and then coming back to himself amongst these surroundings. The location has acquired a pull that overrides the need for conscious thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for slightly suggestive bit of gore.

The bullet splits the skin between two ribs and explodes out her back, but she doesn't stop. Just ahead of her, Sherlock is running, and it propels her forward. They make it to a stretch of supporting wall, and with it, sanctuary.

"Watson?" he says, the two syllables splintering and shattering like glass. 

She can recognize this heady feeling from textbooks and observations from her time in emergency rooms and trauma surgeries. She can pinpoint the effects of worsening anemia. She knows her skin is going white and the hypoxia is turning her lips and nail-beds blue. She's only too aware of what it all means. Yet within her persists the need to minimize, to hide, to let the world go on turning. She rests her palms against the wall. "I just... need to catch my breath." Obstinate almost to the point of delusion. Her grandmother, whom she'd butted heads with from age three until the woman died just after Joan entered med school, would not be surprised at all.

He covers her exit wound, the one he can see, the one too big for anyone to miss. She feels her blood slipping through his fingers and splashing onto the concrete. Her breaths grow more fretful as her lungs are compressed, drowning her on dry land. Tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder, he mumbles a series of denials to her (She'll be fine, really. An ambulance can get to them even out here on the bridge in less than ten minutes. She'll be fine. She'll be fine.) and strengthens his grip, waiting for her to fall.

"Oh. Well, isn't this an unfortunate turn of events."

Of course it was too much to ask that Moriarty simply allow Joan to die knowing who killed her. She had to stop by and gloat first.

"I assure you, this was not what I wanted. Sebastian was meant to cause a commotion, to frighten you. That was all. Now, I wasn't naive enough to think I'd be able to restrain his killer instinct entirely--between prison and the rehabilitation hospital, he has spent quite a long time not killing people--but he was supposed to hit innocent motorists only. It seems he has some pent-up feelings about getting caught. I can't say I don't empathize." Joan bares her teeth with a weak huff of a laugh, and Moriarty is looking down at her hands, putting on a big show as always, every behavior pattern a series of grand gestures. "Though I may have to kill him again for his transgression, properly this time. Removing our Joan from the board before I'm ready to part with her? That cannot be tolerated."

The next thing Moriarty says is lost to the roaring in her ears. She knows she has only a few moments left. 

Better make them count.

Joan breaks away and she runs. 

~

Sherlock stands on the bridge, looking out, seeing nothing. He goes there often without even thinking about it, telling himself or others he'll go home to rest and then coming back to himself amongst these surroundings. The location has acquired a pull that overrides the need for conscious thought. 

It's there that Gregson finds him. "They found her," he says. "She's in New Jersey."

Sherlock nods to himself, a list of relatives and friends to notify beginning with one, Watson's mother, and reproducing rapidly like cellular mitosis.

Gregson makes a strange noise, a cousin of a surprised laugh, but a bit darker and more melancholy. "And Holmes? She's alive."

The scenery begins passing by him very quickly all of a sudden.

"Hey!" 

"Wait up!"

"HOLMES."

His momentum is stopped by a movable but stubborn object, Gregson's hand on his chest. He looks up, blinking.

"Last I heard, anyway," Gregson adds, breathing hard. "Could change at any time."

~

For two days, Sherlock has envisioned her bloated and purple (Found within an hour of the fall, Moriarty had been white with touches of blue. And so very, very still.). Lying on a slab, split open, her organs individually removed and weighed, like the salad ingredients she liked to clean and slice and place in separate containers until she was ready to combine them. This sight before him is glorious in comparison.

He sits down in the chair next to her bed. Court-side seats, as it were.

"Hello," he says.

The various mechanisms keeping Watson a passive participant in her own sustained existence beep and hum in response.

He gently curls his fingers around her wrist.

The sounds of her life support seem to reach a disorienting crescendo, and he digs the blunt fingernails of his free hand into the flesh above his knee. "You might be interested to know," he says, "that I have begun pondering the prospect of getting a dog. Idle consideration only; I'm making no promises. You mustn't allow that to influence your decision in any way."

Her pulse thrums against his fingertips.

"That said, you are aware of what I would like you to choose."


End file.
